The Story of Geographical Discovery: How the World Became Known Part 2

They certainly extended their voyages to Greenland, and there is a good deal of evidence for believing that they travelled from Greenland to Labrador and Newfoundland. In the year 1001, an Icelander named Biorn, sailing to Greenland to visit his father, was driven to the south-west, and came to a country which they called Vinland, inhabited by dwarfs, and having a shortest day of eight hours, which would correspond roughly to 50 north lat.i.tude. The Nors.e.m.e.n settled there, and as late as 1121 the Bishop of Greenland visited them, in order to convert them to Christianity. There is little reason to doubt that this Vinland was on the mainland of North America, and the Nors.e.m.e.n were therefore the first Europeans to discover America. As late as 1380, two Venetians, named Zeno, visited Iceland, and reported that there was a tradition there of a land named Estotiland, a thousand miles west of the Faroe Islands, and south of Greenland. The people were reported to be civilised and good seamen, though unacquainted with the use of the compa.s.s, while south of them were savage cannibals, and still more to the south-west another civilised people, who built large cities and temples, but offered up human victims in them. There seems to be here a dim knowledge of the Mexicans.

The great difficulty in maritime discovery, both for the ancients and the men of the Middle Ages, was the necessity of keeping close to the sh.o.r.e. It is true they might guide themselves by the sun during the day, and by the pole-star at night, but if once the sky was overcast, they would become entirely at a loss for their bearings. Hence the discovery of the polar tendency of the magnetic needle was a necessary prelude to any extended voyages away from land. This appears to have been known to the Chinese from quite ancient times, and utilised on their junks as early as the eleventh century. The Arabs, who voyaged to Ceylon and Java, appear to have learnt its use from the Chinese, and it is probably from them that the mariners of Barcelona first introduced its use into Europe.

The first mention of it is given in a treatise on Natural History by Alexander Neckam, foster-brother of Richard, Coeur de Lion.

Another reference, in a satirical poem of the troubadour, Guyot of Provence (1190), states that mariners can steer to the north star without seeing it, by following the direction of a needle floating in a straw in a basin of water, after it had been touched by a magnet. But little use, however, seems to have been made of this, for Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, when on a visit to Roger Bacon in 1258, states that the friar had shown him the magnet and its properties, but adds that, however useful the discovery, "no master mariner would dare to use it, lest he should be thought to be a magician." Indeed, in the form in which it was first used it would be of little practical utility, and it was not till the method was found of balancing it on a pivot and fixing it on a card, as at present used, that it became a necessary part of a sailor's outfit. This practical improvement is attributed to one Flavio Gioja, of Amalfi, in the beginning of the fourteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MEDITERRANEAN COAST IN THE PORTULANI.]

When once the mariner's compa.s.s had come into general use, and its indications observed by master mariners in their voyages, a much more practical method was at hand for determining the relative positions of the different lands. Hitherto geographers (_i.e._, mainly the Greeks and Arabs) had had to depend for fixing relative positions on the vague statements in the itineraries of merchants and soldiers; but now, with the aid of the compa.s.s, it was not difficult to determine the relative position of one point to another, while all the windings of a road could be fixed down on paper without much difficulty. Consequently, while the learned monks were content with the mixture of myth and fable which we have seen to have formed the basis of their maps of the world, the seamen of the Mediterranean were gradually building up charts of that sea and the neighbouring lands which varied but little from the true position. A chart of this kind was called a Portulano, as giving information of the best routes from port to port, and Baron Nordenskiold has recently shown how all these _portulani_ are derived from a single Catalan map which has been lost, but must have been compiled between 1266 and 1291. And yet there were some of the learned who were not above taking instruction from the practical knowledge of the seamen.

In 1339, one Angelico Dulcert, of Majorca, made an elaborate map of the world on the principle of the portulano, giving the coast line--at least of the Mediterranean--with remarkable accuracy. A little later, in 1375, a Jew of the same island, named Cresquez, made an improvement on this by introducing into the eastern parts of the map the recently acquired knowledge of Cathay, or China, due to the great traveller Marco Polo. His map (generally known as the Catalan Map, from the language of the inscriptions plentifully scattered over it) is divided into eight horizontal strips, and on the preceding page will be found a reduced reproduction, showing how very accurately the coast line of the Mediterranean was reproduced in these portulanos.

With the portulanos, geographical knowledge once more came back to the lines of progress, by reverting to the representation of fact, and, by giving an accurate representation of the coast line, enabled mariners to adventure more fearlessly and to return more safely, while they gave the means for recording any further knowledge. As we shall see, they aided Prince Henry the Navigator to start that series of geographical investigation which led to the discoveries that close the Middle Ages. With them we may fairly close the history of mediaeval geography, so far as it professed to be a systematic branch of knowledge.

We must now turn back and briefly sum up the additions to knowledge made by travellers, pilgrims, and merchants, and recorded in literary shape in the form of travels.

[_Authorities:_ Lelewel, _Geographie du Moyen Age_, 4 vols. and atlas, 1852; C. R. Beazley, _Dawn of Geography_, 1897, and Introduction to _Prince Henry the Navigator_, 1895; Nordenskiold, _Periplus_, 1897.]

CHAPTER IV

MEDIaeVAL TRAVELS

In the Middle Ages--that is, in the thousand years between the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the discovery of the New World in the fifteenth--the chief stages of history which affect the extension of men's knowledge of the world were: the voyages of the Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries, to which we have already referred; the Crusades, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and the growth of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The extra knowledge obtained by the Vikings did not penetrate to the rest of Europe; that brought by the Crusades, and their predecessors, the many pilgrimages to the Holy Land, only restored to Western Europe the knowledge already stored up in cla.s.sical antiquity; but the effect of the extension of the Mongol Empire was of more wide-reaching importance, and resulted in the addition of knowledge about Eastern Asia which was not possessed by the Romans, and has only been surpa.s.sed in modern times during the present century.

Towards the beginning of the thirteenth century, Chinchiz Khan, leader of a small Tatar tribe, conquered most of Central and Eastern Asia, including China. Under his son, Okkodai, these Mongol Tatars turned from China to the West, conquered Armenia, and one of the Mongol generals, named Batu, ravaged South Russia and Poland, and captured Buda-Pest, 1241. It seemed as if the prophesied end of the world had come, and the mighty nations Gog and Magog had at last burst forth to fulfil the prophetic words. But Okkodai died suddenly, and these armies were recalled. Universal terror seized Europe, and the Pope, as the head of Christendom, determined to send amba.s.sadors to the Great Khan, to ascertain his real intentions.

He sent a friar named John of Planocarpini, from Lyons, in 1245, to the camp of Batu (on the Volga), who pa.s.sed him on to the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum, the capital of his empire, of which only the slightest trace is now left on the left bank of the Orkhon, some hundred miles south of Lake Baikal.

Here, for the first time, they heard of a kingdom on the east coast of Asia which was not yet conquered by the Mongols, and which was known by the name of Cathay. Fuller information was obtained by another friar, named WILLIAM RUYSBROEK, or Rubruquis, a Fleming, who also visited Karakorum as an amba.s.sador from St. Louis, and got back to Europe in 1255, and communicated some of his information to Roger Bacon. He says: "These Cathayans are little fellows, speaking much through the nose, and, as is general with all those Eastern people, their eyes are very narrow.... The common money of Cathay consists of pieces of cotton paper; about a palm in length and breadth, upon which certain lines are printed, resembling the seal of Mangou Khan. They do their writing with a pencil such as painters paint with, and a single character of theirs comprehends several letters, so as to form a whole word." He also identifies these Cathayans with the Seres of the ancients. Ptolemy knew of these as possessing the land where the silk comes from, but he had also heard of the Sinae, and failed to identify the two. It has been conjectured that the name of China came to the West by the sea voyage, and is a Malay modification, while the names Seres and Cathayans came overland, and thus caused confusion.

Other Franciscans followed these, and one of them, John of Montecorvino, settled at Khanbalig (imperial city), or Pekin, as Archbishop (ob.

1358); while Friar Odoric of Pordenone, near Friuli, travelled in India and China between 1316 and 1330, and brought back an account of his voyage, filled with most marvellous mendacities, most of which were taken over bodily into the work attributed to Sir John Maundeville.

The information brought back by these wandering friars fades, however, into insignificance before the extensive and accurate knowledge of almost the whole of Eastern Asia brought back to Europe by Marco Polo, a Venetian, who spent eighteen years of his life in the East.

His travels form an epoch in the history of geographical discovery only second to the voyages of Columbus.

In 1260, two of his uncles, named Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, started from Constaninople on a trading venture to the Crimea, after which they were led to visit Bokhara, and thence on to the court of the Great Khan, Kublai, who received them very graciously, and being impressed with the desirability of introducing Western civilisation into the new Mongolian empire, he entrusted them with a message to the Pope, demanding one hundred wise men of the West to teach the Mongolians the Christian religion and Western arts. The two brothers returned to their native place, Venice, in 1269, but found no Pope to comply with the Great Khan's request; for Clement IV. had died the year before, and his successor had not yet been appointed. They waited about for a couple of years till Gregory X. was elected, but he only meagrely responded to the Great Khan's demands, and instructed two Dominicans to accompany the Polos, who on this occasion took with them their young nephew Marco, a lad of seventeen. They started in November 1271, but soon lost the company of the Dominicans, who lost heart and went back.

They went first to Ormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, then struck northward through Khorasan Balkh to the Oxus, and thence on to the Plateau of Pomir. Thence they pa.s.sed the Great Desert of Gobi, and at last reached Kublai in May 1275, at his summer residence in Kaipingfu. Notwithstanding that they had not carried out his request, the Khan received them in a friendly manner, and was especially taken by Marco, whom he took into his own service; and quite recently a record has been found in the Chinese annals, stating that in the year 1277 a certain Polo was nominated a Second-Cla.s.s Commissioner of the PrivyCouncil. His duty was to travel on various missions to Eastern Tibet, to Cochin China, and even to India. The Polos ama.s.sed much wealth owing to the Khan's favour, but found him very unwilling to let them return to Europe.

Marco Polo held several important posts; for three years he was Governor of the great city of Yanchau, and it seemed likely that he would die in the service of Kublai Khan.

But, owing to a fortunate chance, they were at last enabled to get back to Europe. The Khan of Persia desired to marry a princess of the Great Khan's family, to whom he was related, and as the young lady upon whom the choice fell could not be expected to undergo the hards.h.i.+ps of the overland journey from China to Persia, it was decided to send her by sea round the coast of Asia. The Tatars were riot good navigators, and the Polos at last obtained permission to escort the young princess on the rather perilous voyage. They started in 1292, from Zayton, a port in Fokien, and after a voyage of over two years round the South coast of Asia, successfully carried the lady to her destined home, though she ultimately had to marry the son instead of the father, who had died in the interim. They took leave of her, and travelled through Persia to their own place, which they reached in 1295. When they arrived at the ancestral mansion of the Polos, in their coa.r.s.e dress of Tatar cut, their relatives for some time refused to believe that they were really the long-lost merchants. But the Polos invited them to a banquet, in which they dressed themselves all in their best, and put on new suits for every course, giving the clothes they had taken off to the servants. At the conclusion of the banquet they brought forth the shabby dresses in which they had first arrived, and taking sharp knives, began to rip up the seams, from which they took vast quant.i.ties of rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds, into which form they had converted most of their property. This exhibition naturally changed the character of the welcome they received from their relatives, who were then eager to learn how they had come by such riches.

In describing the wealth of the Great Khan, Marco Polo, who was the chief spokesman of the party, was obliged to use the numeral "million" to express the amount of his wealth and the number of the population over whom he ruled. This was regarded as part of the usual travellers' tales, and Marco Polo was generally known by his friends as "Messer Marco Millione."

Such a reception of his stories was no great encouragement to Marco to tell the tale of his remarkable travels, but in the year of his arrival at Venice a war broke out between Genoa and the Queen of the Adriatic, in which Marco Polo was captured and cast into prison at Genoa. There he found as a fellow-prisoner one Rusticano of Pisa, a man of some learning and a sort of predecessor of Sir Thomas Malory, since he had devoted much time to re-writing, in prose, abstracts of the many romances relating to the Round Table.

These he wrote, not in Italian (which can scarcely be said to have existed for literary purposes in those days), but in French, the common language of chivalry throughout Western Europe. While in prison with Marco Polo, he took down in French the narrative of the great traveller, and thus preserved it for all time. Marco Polo was released in 1299, and returned to Venice, where he died some time after 9th January 1334, the date of his will.

Of the travels thus detailed in Marco Polo's book, and of their importance and significance in the history of geographical discovery, it is impossible to give any adequate account in this place. It will, perhaps, suffice if we give the summary of his claims made out by Colonel Sir Henry Yule, whose edition of his travels is one of the great monuments of English learning:--

"He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom which he had seen with his own eyes: the deserts of Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongolian Steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been established by Cambaluc; the first traveller to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders, with all their eccentricities of manners and wors.h.i.+p; of Tibet, with its sordid devotees; of Burma, with its golden paG.o.das and their tinkling crowns; of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin China, of j.a.pan, the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that museum of beauty and wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the Indian Archipelago, source of those aromatics then so highly prized, and whose origin was so dark; of Java, the pearl of islands; of Sumatra, with its many kings, its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of Nicobar and Andaman; of Ceylon, the island of gems, with its sacred mountain, and its tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and personally explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds, and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl, and its powerful sun: the first in mediaeval times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian empire of Abyssinia, and the semi-Christian island of Socotra; to speak, though indeed dimly, of Zanzibar, with its negroes and its ivory, and of the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the dark ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities, and, in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears, and reindeer-riding Tunguses."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRA MAURO'S MAP, 1457.]

Marco Polo's is thus one of the greatest names in the history of geography; it may, indeed, be doubted whether any other traveller has ever added so extensively to our detailed knowledge of the earth's surface. Certainly up to the time of Mr. Stanley no man had on land visited so many places previously unknown to civilised Europe. But the lands he discovered, though already fully populated, were soon to fall into disorder, and to be closed to any civilising influences. Nothing for a long time followed from these discoveries, and indeed almost up to the present day his accounts were received with incredulity, and he himself was regarded more as "Marco Millione"

than as Marco Polo.

Extensive as were Marco Polo's travels, they were yet exceeded in extent, though not in variety, by those of the greatest of Arabian travellers, Mohammed Ibn Batuta, a native of Tangier, who began his travels in 1334, as part of the ordinary duty of a good Mohammedan to visit the holy city of Mecca. While at Alexandria he met a learned sage named Borhan Eddin, to whom he expressed his desire to travel.

Borhan said to him, "You must then visit my brother Farid Iddin and my brother Rokn Eddin in Scindia, and my brother Borhan Eddin in China. When you see them, present my compliments to them." Owing mainly to the fact that the Tatar princes had adopted Islamism instead of Christianity, after the failure of Gregory X. to send Christian teachers to China, Ibn Batuta was ultimately enabled to greet all three brothers of Borhan Eddin. Indeed, he performed a more extraordinary exploit, for he was enabled to convey the greetings of the Sheikh Kawan Eddin, whom he met in China, to a relative of his residing in the Soudan. During the thirty years of his travels he visited the Holy Land, Armenia, the Crimea, Constantinople (which he visited in company with a Greek princess, who married one of the Tatar Khans), Bokhara, Afghanistan, and Delhi. Here he found favour with the emperor Mohammed Inghlak, who appointed him a judge, and sent him on an emba.s.sy to China, at first overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a route, he went ultimately from Calicut, via Ceylon, the Maldives, and Sumatra, to Zaitun, then the great port of China. Civil war having broken out, he returned by the same route to Calicut, but dared not face the emperor, and went on to Ormuz and Mecca, and returned to Tangier in 1349. But even then his taste for travel had not been exhausted. He soon set out for Spain, and worked his way through Morocco, across the Sahara, to the Soudan. He travelled along the Niger (which he took for the Nile), and visited Timbuctoo. He ultimately returned to Fez in 1353, twenty-eight years after he had set out on his travels. Their chief interest is in showing the wide extent of Islam in his day, and the facilities which a common creed gave for extensive travel. But the account of his journeys was written in Arabic, and had no influence on European knowledge, which, indeed, had little to learn from him after Marco Polo, except with regard to the Soudan. With him the history of mediaeval geography may be fairly said to end, for within eighty years of his death began the activity of Prince Henry the Navigator, with whom the modern epoch begins.

Meanwhile India had become somewhat better known, chiefly by the travels of wandering friars, who visited it mainly for the sake of the shrine of St. Thomas, who was supposed to have been martyred in India. Mention should also be made of the early spread of the Nestorian Church throughout Central Asia. As early as the seventh century the Syrian Christians who followed the views of Nestorius began spreading them eastward, founding sees in Persia and Turkestan, and ultimately spreading as far as Pekin. There was a certain revival of their missionary activity under the Mongol Khans, but the restricted nature of the language in which their reports were written prevented them from having any effect upon geographical knowledge, except in one particular, which is of some interest. The fate of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel has always excited interest, and a legend arose that they had been converted to Christianity, and existed somewhere in the East under a king who was also a priest, and known as Prester John. Now, in the reports brought by some of the Nestorian priests westward, it was stated that one of the Mongol princes named Ung Khan had adopted Christianity, and as this in Syriac sounded something like "John the Cohen," or "Priest," he was identified with the Prester John of legend, and for a long time one of the objects of travel in the East was to discover this Christian kingdom. It was, however, later ascertained that there did exist such a Christian kingdom in Abyssinia, and as owing to the erroneous views of Ptolemy, followed by the Arabs, Abyssinia was considered to spread towards Farther India, the land of Prester John was identified in Abyssinia. We shall see later on how this error helped the progress of geographical discovery.

The total addition of these mediaeval travels to geographical knowledge consisted mainly in the addition of a wider extent of land in China, and the archipelago of j.a.pan, or c.i.p.angu, to the map of the world.

The accompanying map displays the various travels and voyages of importance, and will enable the reader to understand how students of geography, who added on to Ptolemy's estimate of the extent of the world east and west the new knowledge acquired by Marco Polo, would still further decrease the distance westward between Europe and c.i.p.angu, and thus prepare men for the voyage of Columbus.

[_Authorities:_ Sir Henry Yule, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, 1865; _The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, 1875.]

CHAPTER V

ROADS AND COMMERCE

We have now conducted the course of our inquiries through ancient times and the Middle Ages up to the very eve of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and we have roughly indicated what men had learned about the earth during that long period, and, how they learned it. But it still remains to consider by what means they arrived at their knowledge, and why they sought for it. To some extent we may have answered the latter question when dealing with the progress of conquest, but men did not conquer merely for the sake of conquest. We have still to consider the material advantages attaching to warfare. Again when men go on their wars of discovery, they have to progress, for the most part, along paths already beaten for them by the natives of the country they intend to conquer; and often when they have succeeded in warfare, they have to consolidate their rule by creating new and more appropriate means of communication.

To put it shortly, we have still to discuss the roads of the ancient and mediaeval worlds, and the commerce for which those roads were mainly used.

A road may be, for our purposes, most readily defined as the most convenient means of communication between two towns; and this logically implies that the towns existed before the roads were made; and in a fuller investigation of any particular roads, it will be necessary to start by investigating why men collect their dwellings at certain definite spots. In the beginning, a.s.semblies of men were made chiefly or altogether for defensive purposes, and the earliest towns were those which, from their natural position, like Athens or Jerusalem, could be most easily defended. Then, again, religious motives often had their influence in early times, and towns would grow round temples or cloisters. But soon considerations of easy accessibility rule in the choice of settlements, and for that purpose towns on rivers, especially at fords of rivers, as Westminster, or in well-protected harbours like Naples, or in the centre of a district, as Nuremberg or Vienna, would form the most convenient places of meeting for exchange of goods. Both on a river, or on the sea-sh.o.r.e, the best means of communication would be by s.h.i.+ps or boats; but once such towns had been established, it would be necessary to connect them with one another by land routes, and these would be determined chiefly by the lie of the land. Where mountains interfered, a large detour would have to be made--as, for example, round the Pyrenees; if rivers intervened, fords would have to be sought for, and a new town probably built at the most convenient place of pa.s.sage. When once a recognised way had been found between any two places, the conservative instincts of man would keep it in existence, even though a better route were afterwards found.

The influence of water communication is of paramount importance in determining the situation of towns in early times. Towns in the corners of bays, like Archangel, Riga, Venice, Genoa, Naples, Tunis, Ba.s.sorah, Calcutta, would naturally be the centre-points of the trade of the bay. On rivers a suitable spot would be where the tides ended, like London, or at conspicuous bends of a stream, or at junctures with affluents, as Coblentz or Khartoum. One nearly always finds important towns at the two ends of a peninsula, like Hamburg and Lubeck, Venice and Genoa; though for naval purposes it is desirable to have a station at the head of the peninsula, to command both arms of the sea, as at Cherbourg, Sevastopol, or Gibraltar. Roads would then easily be formed across the base of the peninsula, and to its extreme point.

At first the inhabitants of any single town would regard those of all others as their enemies, but after a time they would find it convenient to exchange some of their superfluities for those of their neighbours, and in this way trade would begin. Markets would become neutral ground, in which mutual animosities would be, for a time, laid aside for the common advantage; and it would often happen that localities on the border line of two states would be chosen as places for the exchange of goods, ultimately giving rise to the existence of a fresh town. As commercial intercourse increased, the very inaccessibility of fortress towns on the heights would cause them to be neglected for settlements in the valleys or by the river sides, and, as a rule, roads pick out valleys or level ground for their natural course. For military purposes, however, it would sometimes be necessary to depart from the valley routes, and, as we shall see, the Roman roads paid no regard to these requirements.

The earliest communication between nations, as we have seen, was that of the Phoenicians by sea. They founded factories, or neutral grounds for trade, at appropriate spots all along the Mediterranean coasts, and the Greeks soon followed their example in the aegean and Black Seas. But at an early date, as we know from the Bible, caravan routes were established between Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and later on these were extended into Farther Asia. But in Europe the great road-builders were the Romans. Rome owed its importance in the ancient world to its central position, at first in Italy, and then in the whole of the Mediterranean. It combined almost all the advantages necessary for a town: it was in the bend of a river, yet accessible from the sea; its natural hills made it easily defensible, as Hannibal found to his cost; while its central position in the Latian Plain made it the natural resort of all the Latin traders. The Romans soon found it necessary to utilise their central position by rendering themselves accessible to the rest of Italy, and they commenced building those marvellous roads, which in most cases have remained, owing to their solid construction.

"Building" is the proper word to use, for a Roman road is really a broad wall built in a deep ditch so as to come up above the level of the surface. Scarcely any amount of traffic could wear this solid substructure away, and to this day throughout Europe traces can be found of the Roman roads built nearly two thousand years ago. As the Roman Empire extended, these roads formed one of the chief means by which the lords of the world were enabled to preserve their conquests. By placing a legion in a central spot, where many of these roads converged, they were enabled to strike quickly in any direction and overawe the country. Stations were naturally built along these roads, and to the present day many of the chief highways of Europe follow the course of the old Roman roads. Our modern civilisation is in a large measure the outcome of this network of roads, and we can distinctly trace a difference in the culture of a nation where such roads never existed--as in Russia and Hungary, as contrasted with the west of Europe, where they formed the best means of communication. It was only in the neighbourhood of these highways that the fullest information was obtained of the position of towns, and the divisions of peoples; and a sketch map like the one already given, of the chief Roman roads of antiquity, gives also, as it were, a skeleton of the geographical knowledge summed up in the great work of Ptolemy.

But of more importance for the future development of geographical knowledge were the great caravan routes of Asia, to which we must now turn our attention. Asia is the continent of plateaux which culminate in the Steppes of the Pamirs, appropriately called by their inhabitants "the Roof of the World." To the east of these, four great mountain ranges run, roughly, along the parallels of lat.i.tude--the Himalayas to the south, the Kuen-Iun, Thian Shan, and Altai to the north. Between the Himalayas and the Kuen-lun is the great Plateau of Tibet, which runs into a sort of cul-de-sac at its western end in Kashmir. Between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan we have the Gobi Steppe of Mongolia, running west of Kashgar and Yarkand; while between the Thian Shan and the Altai we have the great Kirghiz Steppe. It is clear that only two routes are possible between Eastern and Western Asia: that between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan via Kashgar and Bokhara, and that south of the Altai, skirting the north of the great lakes Balkash, Aral, and Caspian, to the south of Russia. The former would lead to Ba.s.sorah or Ormuz, and thence by sea, or overland, round Arabia to Alexandria; the latter and longer route would reach Europe via Constantinople.

Communication between Southern Asia and Europe would mainly be by sea, along the coast of the Indies, taking advantage of the monsoons from Ceylon to Aden, and then by the Red Sea. Alexandria, Ba.s.sorah, and Ormuz would thus naturally be the chief centres of Eastern trade, while communication with the Mongols or with China would go along the two routes above mentioned, which appear to have existed during all historic time. It was by these latter routes that the Polos and the other mediaeval travellers to Cathay reached that far-distant country. But, as we know from Marco Polo's travels, China could also be reached by the sea voyage; and for all practical purposes, in the late Middle Ages, when the Mongol empire broke up, and traffic through mid Asia was not secure, communication with the East was via Alexandria.

Now it is important for our present inquiry to realise how largely Europe after the Crusades was dependent on the East for most of the luxuries of life. Nothing produced by the looms of Europe could equal the silk of China, the calico of India, the muslin of Mussul.

The chief gems which decorated the crowns of kings and n.o.bles, the emerald, the topaz, the ruby, the diamond, all came from the East--mainly from India. The whole of mediaeval medical science was derived from the Arabs, who sought most of their drugs from Arabia or India. Even for the incense which burned upon the innumerable altars of Roman Catholic Europe, merchants had to seek the materials in the Levant. For many of the more refined handicrafts, artists had to seek their best material from Eastern traders: such as sh.e.l.lac for varnish, or mastic for artists' colours (gamboge from Cambodia, ultramarine from lapis lazuli); while it was often necessary, under mediaeval circ.u.mstances, to have resort to the musk or opopanax of the East to counteract the odours resulting from the bad sanitary habits of the West. But above all, for the condiments which were almost necessary for health, and certainly desirable for seasoning the salted food of winter and the salted fish of Lent. Europeans were dependent upon the spices of the Asiatic islands. In Hakluyt's great work on "English Voyages and Navigations," he gives in his second volume a list, written out by an Aleppo merchant, William Barrett, in 1584, of the places whence the chief staples of the Eastern trade came, and it will be interesting to give a selection from his long account.

Cloves from Maluco, Tarenate, Amboyna, by way of Java.

Nutmegs from Banda.

Maces from Banda, Java, and Malacca.

Pepper Common from Malabar.

Sinnamon from Seilan (Ceylon).

Spicknard from Zindi (Scinde) and Lahor.

Ginger Sorattin from Sorat (Surat) within Cambaia (Bay of Bengal).